Hello, and welcome positively dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boylar.

One of the first things that happened after school broke for some or earlier this year

is that the Supreme Court's six Republican-appointed justices throughout President Biden's plan

to forgive a bunch of student-long debt. They said the forgiveness program that Biden announced

about a year ago, in which several million graduates and former students had already applied for,

was an unlawful use of the administration's emergency authority to waive or modify student

loan arrangements. So the new class of students poised to begin college and rack up more debt.

The administration has had to decide how to respond to the court. And that has essentially

revived the intra-democratic, intra-liberal debate over the merits of forgiving student loans

as a policy priority. There are those who say Biden should reintroduce the same relief plan

all over again, this time under a different authority contained in the Higher Education Act.

There are others who say a plan B like that is destined to meet the same fate as plan A,

and that Biden should therefore cut his losses on mass student debt forgiveness and focus on

forward-looking policy. For his part, Biden appears to be attempting both things at once.

In the near term, to help borrowers whose payments will become due again next month,

he's announced a plan to tie repayment to income and family size in ways that should help many

borrowers save money. Then sometime next year he'll try to wipe most of that remaining debt off

the books like he did a year ago. When you add all that up, you get a kind of policy mishmash

that could leave even highly attuned student debt holders confused about what they should do.

Some will likely end up delinquent on their loans. Others will pay only to find out that

Biden's going to try to forgive their debt anyhow. Then to make matters more confusing still,

there are a whole other set of experts who believe this should never have been a priority for Biden

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